With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
While Fate grew pale lest he should win the town,
And turn'd the iron leaves of his dark book

To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook.

-I beg no pity for this mouldering clay;
For if you give it burial, there it takes
Possession of your earth:

If burnt, and scatter'd in the air, the winds

That strew my dust diffuse my royalty,

And spread me o'er your clime; for where one atom

Of mine shall light, know there Sebastian reigns.

Of these quotations the two first may be allowed to be great, the two latter only tumid.

Of such selection there is no end. I will add only a few more passages; of which the first, though it may perhaps be quite clear in prose, is not too obscure for poetry, as the meaning that it has is noble.

No, there is a necessity in fate,

Why still the brave bold man is fortunate:
He keeps his object ever full in sight;
And that assurance holds him firm and right;
True, 'tis a narrow way that leads to bliss,

But right before there is no precipice;

Fear makes men look aside, and so their footing miss.

Of the images which the two following citations afford, the first is elegant, the second magnificent; whether either be just let the reader judge :

What precious drops are these,

Which silently each other's track pursue,
Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?
-Resign your castle-

-Enter, brave Sir; for, when you speak the word,

The gates shall open of their own accord;

The genius of the place its lord shall meet,

And bow its towery forehead at your feet.

These bursts of extravagance Dryden calls the Dalilahs of the theatre; and owns that many noisy lines of Maximin and Almanzor call out for vengeance upon him: "but I knew," says he," that they were bad

enough to please, even when I wrote them." There is surely reason to suspect that he pleased himself as well as his audience; and that these, like the harlots of other men, had his love, though not his approbation. He had sometimes faults of a less generous and splendid kind. He makes, like almost all other poets, very frequent use of mythology, and sometimes connects religion and fable too closely without distinction.

He descends to display his knowledge with pedantick ostentation; as when, in translating Virgil, he says, "tack to the larboard," and "veer starboard;" and talks in another work, of "virtue spooning before the wind." His vanity now and then betrays his igno

rance.

They Nature's king through Nature's opticks view'd;
Revers'd, they view'd him lessen'd to their eyes.

He had heard of reversing a telescope, and unluckily reverses the object.

He is sometimes unexpectedly mean. When he describes the Supreme Being as moved by prayer to stop the fire of London, what is his expression?

A hollow crystal pyramid he takes,
In firmamental waters dipp'd above,
Of this a broad extinguisher he makes,

And hoods the flames that to the quarry strove.

When he describes the last day, and the decisive tribunal, he intermingles this image:

When rattling bones together fly,

From the four quarters of the sky.

It was indeed never in his power to resist the temptation of a jest. In his Elegy on Cromwell:

No sooner was the Frenchman's cause embrac'd,

Than the light monsieur the grave don outweigh'd;

His fortune turn'd the scale

He had a vanity, unworthy of his abilities, to show, as may be suspected, the rank of the company with whom he lived, by the use of French words, which

had then crept into conversation; such as fraicheur for coolness, fougue for turbulence, and a few more, none of which the language has incorporated or retained. They continue only where they stood first, perpetual warnings to future innovators.

These are his faults of affectation; his faults of negligence are beyond recital. Such is the unevenness of his compositions, that ten lines are seldom found together without something of which the reader is ashamed. Dryden was no rigid judge of his own pages; he seldom struggled after supreme excellence, but snatched in haste what was within his reach; and when he could content others, was himself contented. He did not keep present to his mind an idea of pure perfection; nor compare his works, such as they were, with what they might be made. He knew to whom he should be opposed. He had more musick than Waller, more vigour than Denham, and more nature than Cowley; and from his contemporaries he was in no danger. Standing therefore in the highest place, he had no care to rise by contending with himself; but while there was no name above his own, was willing to enjoy fame on the easiest

terms.

He was no lover of labour. What he thought sufficient, he did not stop to make better; and allowed himself to leave many parts unfinished, in confidence that the good lines would overbalance the bad. What he had once written, he dismissed from his thoughts; and I believe there is no example to be found of any correction or improvement made by him after publication. The hastiness of his productions might be the effect of necessity; but his subsequent neglect could hardly have any other cause than impatience of study.

What can be said of his versification will be little more than a dilation of the praise given it by Pope :

Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse; the full-resounding line,
The long majestick march, and energy divine.

}

Some improvements had been already made in English numbers; but the full force of our language was not yet felt; the verse that was smooth was commonly feeble. If Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance. Dryden knew how to choose the flowing and the sonorous words; to vary the pauses, and adjust the accents; to diversify the cadence, and yet preserve the smoothness of his metre.

Of triplets and alexandrines, though he did not introduce the use, he established it. The triplet has long subsisted among us. Dryden seems not to have traced it higher than to Chapman's Homer; but it is to be found in Phaer's Virgil, written in the reign of Mary; and in Hall's Satires, published five years before the death of Elizabeth.

The alexandrine was, I believe, first used by Spenser, for the sake of closing his stanza with a fuller sound. We had a longer measure of fourteen syllables, into which the Eneid was translated by Phaer, and other works of the ancients by other writers; of which Chapman's Iliad was, I believe, the last.

The two first lines of Phaer's third Eneid will exemplify this measure:

When Asia's state was overthrown, and Priam's kingdom stout, All guiltless, by the power of gods above was rooted out.

As these lines had their break, or cæsura, always at the eighth syllable, it was thought, in time, commodious to divide them: and quatrains of lines, alternately consisting of eight and six syllables, make the most soft and pleasing of our lyrick measures; as,

Relentless time, destroying power,
Which stone and brass obey,
Who giv❜st to ev'ry flying hour
To work some new decay.

In the alexandrine, when its power was once felt, some poems, as Drayton's Polyolbion, were wholly written; and sometimes the measures of twelve and fourteen syllables were interchanged with one another. Cowley was the first that inserted the alexandrine at pleasure among the heroick lines of ten syllables, and from him Dryden professes to have adopted it.

The triplet and alexandrine are not universally approved. Swift always censured them, and wrote some lines to ridicule them. In examining their propriety, it is to be considered that the essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse, is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule; a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for id entity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it. Thus a Latin hexameter is formed from dactyls and spondees differently combined; the English heroick admits of acute or grave syllables variously disposed. The Latin never deviates into seven feet, or exceeds the number of seventeen syllables; but the English alexandrine breaks the lawful bounds, and surprises the reader with two syllables more than he expected.

The effect of the triplet is the same; the ear has been accustomed to expect a new rhyme in every couplet; but is on a sudden surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direction.